The First Picture Ever Uploaded to the Internet, ca. 1992

This is the first picture ever uploaded to the internet in 1992. It was taken by IT developer Silvano de Gennaro, the photo is a shot of Les Horrible Cernettes, a comedy band that rocked out nearby Geneva's CERN laboratory from 1992. Gennaro had shot the photo with a Canon EOS 650 and it just so happened Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web was working at CERN at the time) was also working on a new version of the Web (one that could handle photos). Berners-Lee, desperate for a good test photo to try out on his new Web hit up Gennaro's desk. Lucky for Berners-Lee, Gennaro was fooling around with a scanned GIF of the photo on Photoshop 1.0 on a Mac.

"Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing a historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!" - Gennaro said.

And here's the original photo before Photoshop. Photo: Silvano de Gennaro/CERN.